Collected poems

To be translated, the work of Mallarmé must be transmuted, leading to a poetry just as weirdly and irreducibly English as his is in French. But alchemical operations are conducted according to rules, and poet Weinfield (Sonnets Elegiac and Satirical) has chosen as his focus Mallarmé's elaboration of rhyme and meter. Since poetic forms are as indigenous to their languages as the senses and sounds of words themselves (and since English has many fewer rhyme-words than French), this is a brave undertaking. Mallarmé's work subverts the standardized, highly rhetorical conventions of traditional French verse; he uses the confines of poetic form to set free and play with private images and syntactical or semantic ambiguities. English poetry is much less formal-many of the conventions it once observed have fallen into abeyance during the last century. By now, there are relatively few poets with a sufficient command of form to use it against the grain in the manner of Mallarmé. Unfortunately, Weinfield is not among them: his rhymes are flat and obtrusive, he lacks prosodic tact, and his choice of diction, which appears propelled more by the dictionary than by the drift of the poems, aggravates matters. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Mallarmé was a French Symbolist poet of the 19th century who had much to do with molding the literature of our times. Until now, however, his writings have been unevenly and incompletely represented in English. This collection, put together and translated by poet/scholar Weinfield, makes the poems of Mallarmé accessible to late 20th-century readers for the first time. This hefty volume contains Weinfield's introduction; the poems and prose poems themselves, with English and French versions en face; and a meticulous poem-by-poem critique and commentary. By staying close to the language and meter of the originals, Weinfield has artfully retained their flavor. In 1866, when Mallarmé was composing "Afternoon of a Faun," which the French poet Paul Valéry considered the greatest poem in all of French literature, Mallarmé wrote, "When a poem is ripe, it will drop free. You can see that I'm imitating the laws of nature." Throughout, the poet's creative process imitates nature as it ripens into the fresh fruits of his poetry. Essential for all libraries that collect poetry in English translation.-Judy Clarence, California State Univ. Lib., Hayward (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.